The “profoundly disturbing” zero-star movie Roger Ebert called “a sadistic exercise in moronic violence”
If there’s a certain movie you hate with every fibre of your being, then there’s a decent chance you’ll also despise a movie that’s similar in almost every way. Unfortunately, since his job was to watch whatever was releasing on the big screen, Roger Ebert didn’t really have a choice.
The critic didn’t really care for Michael Winner’s 1974 revenge thriller, Death Wish, from a narrative perspective, at least. Starring Charles Bronson in all of his granite-faced glory as a vengeful family man exacting retribution on the people who tore his family apart, it came under heavy fire for celebrating vigilantism.
Ebert awarded the film a surprising three stars out of four, prefaced with the warning that it was a “quasi-fascist advertisement for urban vigilantes, done up in a slick and exciting action movie.” He appreciated the filmmaking and Bronson’s performance, though, despite labelling it as “propaganda for private gun ownership and a call to vigilante justice.”
Naturally, since it was a hit, it was inevitable that a slew of cheap imitators would roll off the production line. One of the many was writer and director James Glickenhaus’s The Exterminator, which finds Robert Ginty’s John Eastland donning a motorcycle helmet and laying waste to street-level crime after his friend and fellow Vietnam veteran is left paralysed after being assaulted by a gang of vicious thugs.
In his review, in which he gave it the princely sum of zero stars, Ebert called the picture “a direct ripoff of Death Wish” and “a sick example of the almost unbelievable descent into gruesome savagery in American movies.” There’s a place for violence in cinema, albeit when it’s done well, and he didn’t think for a second that the film was anything other than an excuse to splatter blood and bodies across the screen.
“It is essentially just a sadistic exercise in moronic violence, supported by a laughable plot,” he fumed. “What’s profoundly disturbing about the film is that it uses this ‘justification’ in the plot as an excuse for revenge scenes of the sickest possible perversion. The motive is obviously to shock or titillate the audience, not to show plausible actions by the character.”
The revenge thriller subgenre has gifted the world with some all-time classics, but The Exterminator wasn’t one of them. Instead, Ebert could barely comprehend the brutality he was seeing, which he didn’t think existed for any other reason than to test how far the limits of good taste could be pushed, something he held Death Wish plenty responsible for.
“The Exterminator exists primarily to show burnings, shootings, gougings, grindings, and beheadings,” he offered, with his apathy barely containable. “It is a small, unclean exercise in shame.” He wasn’t the only one to feel that way, with the movie generating plenty of controversy for its no-holds-barred depictions of wanton violence, which didn’t prevent it from turning a small profit during its run on the silver screen.
Bringing his contempt of the garish revenge story full circle, there’s only one title of its ilk that Ebert detested as much as he detested The Exterminator, and it was Death Wish II.
